This past week, I morphed into one of those annoying people who can’t get off their cell phone. No, I wasn’t playing a game or even checking facebook, but I still spent at least an hour a day obsessively refreshing twitter. This week, the National Alliance to End Homelessness held its annual conference in Washington, D.C. I couldn’t quite hear the presentations from an hour away in Baltimore, so I relied on the almost 1600 attendees — the most the conference has ever seen — to keep me updated.
To many, this probably doesn’t sound like a great use of a sunny week in July. It is surprising then, that the overwhelming message I took from an event on poverty, mental health, addiction, hunger, HIV/AIDS, veterans, and youth homelessness, was one of hope.
If you didn’t spend your week as I did, let me be the first to break the news: we’re in the middle of an underdog story. In my opinion, the big winner this year in the Race to End Homelessness, was New Orleans, Louisiana. A city I’ve criticized in the past for its frightening statistics when it comes to general homelessness, chronic homelessness, and veteran homelessness, NOLA has done something remarkable — changed their trends.
In 2005, New Orleans suffered one of the worst storms in recent history when Hurricane Katrina descended. The storm destroyed, among other infrastructure, much of the city’s affordable housing and service programs, leaving many homeless. An already serious problem in the city worsened, propelling NOLA to earn the title of the city with the second highest rate of homelessness nationwide.
Nearly eight years later, many former New Orleans residents are still displaced or struggling to recover, but homelessness has decreased significantly. Chronic homelessness has decreased by 47 percent in the city since 2009, and in some parishes this number is as high as 79 percent. Martha Kegel, the Executive Director of UNITY of Greater New Orleans and Stacy Horn Koch, Director of Homeless Policy in New Orleans write that, “New Orleans is on track to become one of the first cities to eliminate the long-term homelessness of people with disabilities, in line with the federal plan to end chronic homelessness by 2015.”
How did New Orleans surge ahead in the race? Kegel and Koch credit extra emergency vouchers, the city’s 10 year plan to end homelessness, and support from Mayor Landrieu as the key factors that have led the city to find and help those affected by Katrina. Service providers target the most vulnerable people and attempt to house them first. Search teams comb vacant buildings to find people dwelling inside and connect them with housing and services. When the storm displaced the city’s population, outreach teams went looking for them.
Numbers for New Orleans are not quite back to pre-Katrina levels, but with 2,337 people experiencing homelessness today, things are much better than in 2007, when over 11,000 people were without housing in the city.
We can — and should — celebrate the progress happening in Louisiana. More importantly, we can learn from this comeback story. Each city faces a unique set of challenges when it comes to ending homelessness, but if New Orleans can move from one of this county’s worst natural disasters to end homelessness by 2015, there is nothing stopping the rest of us from making strides in the Race to End Homelessness.
